Telos and Linear Acoustic: Helping Broadcasters Keep Their Eye on the Shifting Center of the
Broadcast Universe
In a Three Part Interview, Chief Technology Officer of Telos Alliance Highlights Pressing Issues
Broadcasters Face with New Audio Formats and The Proliferation of Mobile Devices
CLEVELAND – August 11, 2014 — As the television broadcast industry increases in complexity
with producers churning out more content than any other time in history, where and how consumers view content has become anything but
predictable. This has put strain and uncertainty on
broadcast professionals, who are constantly
building and adapting new content distribution
models and working methodologies where no
precedents currently exist. There is a lot at stake
for broadcasters, since their function is critical to
both the content producers and consumers.
Linear Acoustic, part of the Telos Alliance, continues to play an active role not only in helping
define this new broadcast distribution landscape, but also in helping its international customer
base understand and overcome these new challenges. Tim Carroll, founder of Linear Acoustic
and Chief Technology Officer of the Telos Alliance, discusses the changes taking place and how
Telos and Linear Acoustic are positioned to help customers navigate and overcome these challenges in the first of a three-part interview.
What are some of the primary issues the television broadcast industry has faced over recent
years? What has changed and what has remained the same?
When we consider television broadcast as we know it today, we can safely say that the loudness
and surround problems have largely been solved. As an industry we have been at this for over
20 years, and it's mostly done. More recently, the way we are consuming television has dramatically changed. For example, I have a surround system, but I primarily listen to content in stereo.
Many people in younger generations are consuming television online. Everyone is doing it differently; there are financial reasons for this, and the technology is making it easier to do so.
Has this made the 'traditional' delivery method of television less relevant?
Well, most of the media says that it is still the terrestrial delivery of television that generates the
most revenue per second out of any content. But this is rapidly becoming an incorrect perception, because nowadays it is so difficult to measure exactly how many people are watching television let alone the methods they are using to watch it. We see many more people watching television on mobile devices in the middle of the day, for example.
What changed for the broadcasters? How does this affect them and how do they now think
about broadcast delivery differently?
To start with, the normal tool set that broadcasters have in a linear broadcast chain is now completely different. The processes used to deliver broadcast content second over second have
changed completely. Now, much of the produced content is chopped up, jammed onto a server
and oftentimes played back from multiple servers. Additionally, commercials now are inserted on
your portable device as part of an app. In the past, we used to know where to put the loudness
correction, but where do we put it now?
This means the content has been more difficult to contain since the 'central point of origin' is not
as easy to identify, right?
Yes. The industry has always had its eyes on the middle of the pie, because the middle is where
traditional technology business is done at a television facility day in and day out — it’s where all
the servers have traditionally been located. You put a processor in there, and at prime time, it
affects every sample of audio. But as soon as this center is fractured and audio is coming out
from multiple places outside the edge of the pie, it becomes much more complicated and less
predictable. We can control that content coming out of the middle of the pie where the central
server is located, but we have no idea where the content goes after that. In some cases, broadcasters are making 8, 10 different versions of a single program to hit all kinds of mobile devices,
to hit larger mobile devices, large and small. All of this has pushed us to accelerate our thinking
at Telos and Linear Acoustic.
Can you give me an example of how broadcasting is now less location dependent?
Sure. Let’s say I am making a program — a police drama. After it is produced, what happens is
not necessarily up to the production people — it’s up to the broadcasters who say, "Hey, thanks
for the content, we have to get this through our linear paths without touching it. We’ve also got to
send it out to all these other destinations, and we better get it onto YouTube before somebody
rips it or sells it." Yesterday, you could often go to whoever owned the television station as a single point. But today, that producer's broadcast content could be housed in servers across multiple locations and therefore becomes much more difficult to manage.
Can anything be done to remedy this?
We can help the broadcasters get the loudness or the 5.1 correct, but eventually the garden
hose turns into a firehose before the content is sprayed out across the universe. And if nobody
was touching it, our job would be done. But with Internet, it is essentially the Wild West. So with
our normal tools, we have to start thinking outside the box. We need to look at the guts of our
products and say to our customers, "Hey, we are happy to help you integrate our technology in
your server hardware instead of selling you boxes that might not fit your workflow."
Is technological innovation helping resolve these issues or exacerbating them?
It's a bit of cat and mouse. If you go and see a movie today, you might be lucky enough to find a
theater and a piece of content that is being played back in Immersive Sound. Now, program producers are saying, ‘Wow — we can do a 360 degree immersive audio experience. But then the
questions start coming out: “Hey, can we get this same experience to consumers?” Then the
broadcast industry says, "We just delivered 5.1 and now you want us to carry 128 channels to
consumers?" But that’s what ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) 3.0 is all about:
how do we deliver an entertainment experience like consumers have in a movie theater? If we
are able to deliver an immersive experience to the home, how do we then ensure mobile device
users can enjoy it to a similar degree? So there is no finite end point, because consumers always want more content and want to access it more conveniently. Consumers see the end and
Hollywood sees the beginning. It is the middle that has to catch up, yet this is the part that nobody sees.
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Contact:
Jeff Touzeau
Public Relations
Hummingbird Media, Inc.
(914) 602-2913
jeff@hummingbirdmedia.com